Creative Common Copyright Notice in Standalones

[David Bovill]

In general Jan, I share your aims here, and there is I feel a clear
solution, some of which can be addressed by choosing the right license, but
I' still like to get clear about some of the things you are trying to do.
Maybe we can talk on Skype, as I'm doing quite a lot of work in this area at
the moment - and email is maybe better after a good chat?

On 11 January 2011 19:54, Jan Schenkel <janschenkel at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Often library stacks use 'script local' variables to store data, and
> 'private' commands and functions to hide the innards. Example:
>

Ah OK - got you....


> Now it may sound far-fetched, but suppose some enterprising individual says
> "Hmm, I really like that open source Smurf library, and I'm going to make
> some money - but I don't want to share back my extensions"
>

The only way to force sharing back is to "force sharing back" = viral GPL
clause. There is no non-viral way to do this.


> And now he can even charge for his ACME Smurf Library.


That is of course always possible with open source licenses - though the
non-commercial CC content licenses forbid this.


> As long as he's sharing the 'cracked open' version of Quartam Smurf
> Library. From my reading of the more liberal FOSS licenses, there is nothing
> you can do: he's 'sharing his changes' to the Quartam Smurf Library, but
> morally he is clearly abusing it.
>

Still not quite clear. Do you want people to be able to adapt / improve and
change the private handlers? Or do you want these fixed under your control
only? I'm assuming you want them open and the changes shared back - so it's
his ability to copy and not share back that you want to prevent.


Frankly, I don't care so much about that as long as the changes to the
> library are shared and available, and the license documentation and
> copyright requirements are upheld.
>

This sounds like the same mix of requirements that I think will work best
for a number of developers. That is:

   1. Open source libraries that you can use freely, modify, and combine
   with other peoples source code from the community
   2. Ensure that accreditation is given to the main contributors
   3. Give the maximum legal protection to the authors - so they can sleep
   at night

But, I think we would agree that we'd also like:

   - To allow individuals and commercial companies to release software which
   combines their own closed code along side the above open source - without
   forcing them to open their code.
   - But to as strongly as possible encourage authors to feed back useful
   improvements to the core libraries, and not simply take the benefits without
   contributing back.

It is that latter two points that tend to contradict each other. If you want
to allow companies the (non-viral) freedom to release software that uses the
library - then you can use a permissive (ie MIT/X11 style) license. But then
this contradicts the second intention - and people can easily just take and
not go to the trouble of feeding back. In this situation authors can take
advantage of dual licensing. I'm not entirely sure, but it feels like this
is the contradiction you are wrestling with?

As an example of this, I'll be releasing my code under both GPL and a closed
commercial license. Educators, hobbyists and members of the community can
use all of it for free in commercial or non-commercial apps, but they must
publish the full source code of their apps, so that any modifications or
additions can be rolled back into core code by the community. This is fully
viral. However, anyone wishing to include parts or all of this code in
closed apps can do so by taking out a separate closed license, which will
come as one of the benefits of taking out an annual subscription to the
project.

This can be done on a per-project basis, but I also think (for reasons of
scale), it will be useful to have a general community owned project in which
any commercial revenue is re-invested in new open source code paid directly
to freelance members of the community. This community project is what I am
working on as part of Live Code TV, with the aim of launching it at the
forthcoming conference. A good chunk of it will be the legal framework
needed to make this run smoothly, but there will also be a bunch of tools to
make the sharing as painless and fun as possible.

Stay tuned to LiveCode TV, and drop into ChatRev to get a sneak peak :)